11
comments:

Daniel Jack Williamson
said...

Mystifying.

There are other "body fashions" I find mystifying, too. What's up with the popularity of the "gothic" look these days? I've noticed a lot of young women with a very pale complexion dying their hair black, wearing black lipstick and nail polish, and adorning themselves with tattoos and jewelry in morbid shapes like spiders and skulls. I think the end result is hideous.

For that matter, I don't understand the appeal of tattoos or body piercing at all. Would someone like to attempt to demystify this for me?

I used to be considered a "light-skinned" girl. But my problem has never been my skin. I have ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS hated my hair. ALWAYS.

I would frown and cringe whenever it was "touch-up" time, and I would be beaming ear-to-ear whenever I got my relaxer. I contemplated cutting all my relaxed hair off so I could rock a natural style, but I chickened out as soon as I got into the chair at the salon.

There is such a tendency during those years to hold one's self up to impossible and ridiculous standards. For me, it was body image. I had curves in an era when curves weren't very popular. I thought I was fat and dieted my 5' 7" self down to 88 pounds one year.

What we self-haters forget and need to be reminded of is that beauty comes from the inside out. The longer I live, the more I realize that it's true.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that Christ thought each of us important enough to die for and self-hatred is like slapping Him in the face.

This is poignant post. As a people we are still suffering the external and internal trauma of slavery and racism (which is the code word for hatred). The trouble is healing the psyche is a difficult task one person, much less a whole people. But it is very necessary!

Believe it or not, I'm on the phone with a friend of mine discussing this very post right now. I wanted to tell him about it, but he found it before I could get to him. Hopefully, you will meet him soon. He and his wife plan to start blogs of their own.

This is something that has always been foreign to me. My grandmother is about your shade, Paula; my mother is quite lighter. I never grew up thinking that light skin made a woman prettier, and I never recall wanting lighter skin, not even to look like my mother. I don't know if it was conscious effort on my family's part to make sure I never grew up color conscious, or if I just never paid any attention (my aunt and great-grandmother are brown-skinned women). It makes me so, so sad when I read things like this is so rampant in not only the black community, but apparently darn near every minority group that exists! What do we do to combat such a thing? Where do we even start? Maybe we can't save our generation, but we sure as hell can fight to save the next one from the kind of pain that you apparently have felt before.

I cried and cried watching Oprah's Memorial Day episode, which featured Kiri Davis, the black girl who -- along with her mother, sat on Oprah's couch discussing this new race doll study and matters of light-skin versus dark-skin.

Oprah recounted the story of when she knew she was brown-skinned when she went to live with a very fair-skinned woman and the woman made Oprah sleep on the porch, while the lighter-skinned child got to sleep in the house.

This Oprah show was so touching.

It featured a dark-skinned young man and his mother, who had prayed that her son not be born dark-skinned because of all the pain she herself had encountered.

I could relate to her pleas in a way, because for all my enlightenment, I do find myself checking out the gorgeous darker skin of my son and daughter as we tan in the summer.

Thank God for Dr. Robin, ironically herself very light, for saying that the mom needed to deal with her own skin-color issues.

Of course she's right, but it probably would've sat better coming from the very dark and gorgeous producer Oprah said she has that has a wonderful attitude about herself.